Projects were moved without being archived

I just realized that my husband backed up my computer hard drive onto an external hard drive, then threw in the trash all my movie files to make room on my hard drive. BUT when I try to bring up any of those movie files on the external hard drive, it gives me the message "broken link". He did not archive the files before moving them.
Is there any way to restore these backed up iMovie and iDVD projects so that I can retrieve them???